The present invention relates generally to the field of software applications, and more particularly to managing updates of mobile software applications.
Users of mobile computing devices install mobile software applications to enable the mobile devices to perform a variety of tasks. Mobile applications were initially geared towards general productivity and information retrieval (e.g., e-mail, calendar, weather, etc.) but have expanded into other categories, such as entertainment and mobile commerce (e.g., games, banking, online purchases, etc.). Mobile applications are available for purchase by a user through application distribution platforms, such as application stores that are operated by the owner of the mobile operating system. Mobile applications are also available to users for installation over a content delivery network (CDN). CDNs are large distributed systems of content servers deployed in multiple data centers across the Internet to serve content to end-users with high availability and high performance that content providers pay to have delivered to end-users.
For a mobile computing device to install and/or update mobile applications from the application store or CDN, the mobile computing device connects to the Internet (e.g., mobile broadband, wireless personal area network (WPAN), tethering, peer to peer (P2P), etc.). Mobile broadband delivers wireless Internet through mobile phone towers to mobile computing devices and other digital devices using portable modems. WPAN is a network for interconnecting devices centered on the workspace of an individual person when within range of the network, in which the connections are wireless. Tethering connects one device to another through WPAN, piconet, or a physical connection and allows the sharing of the Internet connection (e.g., mobile hotspot). A piconet is a small network composed of up to as many as eight active devices in a master-slave relationship. P2P is a network in which interconnected nodes share resources simultaneously functioning as both clients and servers to the other nodes on the network. Once a connection to the Internet is established, the mobile software application downloads to the mobile computing device.